Monday, January 17, 2011

What's on my mind---

I've been back just a week from Costa Rica, a trip that was neatly bookended by two huge snowstorms. The first one stopped only hours before our takeoff and the second and larger came in the day after we got home. Most of that one is still in evidence this morning. We went with Joy who teaches Art at DeCordova and for whom I sometimes work who set up the trip with Janice, one of her former students who with her husband, a charming Frenchman, operate a foundation that allows small groups to experience life in a virgin rainforest. We were joined by Ruth, another former student who brought her son George along, an impressive young man of college age. Cotting, our erstwhile houseguest of last summer joined us from the Yucutan Peninsula where she lives. Our flight to San Jose took six hours interrupted by a three hour stop in Orlando. We then had to go to a small local airport and take a tiny propeller driven plane for a one hour flight to a remote and little known peninsula called Osa near the Panama border. It was late afternoon when we landed and we still had to cross a wide inlet of the Pacific by motorboat to reach the remote location of the camp. The crossing took nearly an hour during which we saw scores of dolphins leaping and cavorting around our boat. It was almost dark when we arrived and since there was no dock we had to disembark into knee deep water and wade ashore. The camp was set back a few hundred feet from the water's edge in a clearing made from the virgin foe